Followers

Thursday, December 6, 2012

The Obama administration and the corporate media have cited
unspecified “intelligence” about the movement of chemical weapons to
issue new threats of direct intervention in Syria, where Washington and
its allies have been backing so-called “rebels” in a bid to topple the
regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both
made public statements Monday alleging a danger of Syria using chemical
weapons and threatening US retaliation.

Appearing before a military audience at the National Defense
University in Fort McNair, Obama declared, “I want to make it absolutely
clear to Assad and anyone who is under his command… If you make the
tragic mistake of using these weapons there will be consequences and you
will be held accountable.”

“This is a red line for the United States,” Clinton said earlier in
the day after a meeting in Prague with Czech Foreign Minister Karel
Schwarzenberg.

“I’m not going to telegraph in any specifics what we would do in the
event of credible evidence that the Assad regime has resorted to using
chemical weapons against their own people, but suffice it to say that
we’re certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to
occur,” Clinton warned.

Schwarzenberg told the media that Czech troops specializing in
chemical weapons had been sent to Jordan and were “training” with forces
there.

Citing unnamed senior officials who claim to have seen unspecified intelligence on Syrian chemical weapons, the New York Times,
CNN and other media have joined forces with the Obama administration in
promoting the chemical weapons justification for another US war of
aggression.

What becomes clear in examining these reports, as well as the
statements from the administration, is that the alleged threat from
Syrian “weapons of mass destruction” is entirely concocted. Not a single
piece of hard evidence is cited by any government official or any media
source.

In a breathless report on Monday, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent
Barbara Starr quoted an unnamed “senior US official” as describing
“worrying signs” of supposed activity around chemical weapons sites in
Syria in “the last few days.”

“The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the
sensitiveness of the information discussed, declined to specify the
exact intelligence that the United States has gathered in the past few
days,” Starr said.

The CNN report quotes one US official as saying that “this puts us into the contingency of potential US action.”

The chemical weapons story was initially broken on Sunday by the New York Times in a front-page article co-authored by David Sanger, the Times’chief
Washington correspondent, and Eric Schmitt, its national security
correspondent. Writing that “what exactly the Syrian forces intend to do
with the weapons remains murky,”
the Times correspondents cited as their source unnamed “officials who have seen the intelligence from Syria.”

Syria’s Foreign Ministry categorically denied that the country’s
military is preparing to use chemical weapons. A statement released in
Damascus said that Syria “would not use chemical weapons—if there are
any—against its own people under any circumstances.”
What is particularly significant in the statements of Obama and other
US officials is the absence of any expression of concern over the
Syrian military’s chemical weapons stockpile falling into the hands of
the so-called rebels whom Washington is supporting.

It has become impossible to conceal the fact that the main fighting
force challenging the Assad regime is dominated by Islamist militias,
including forces tied to Al Qaeda, who would be prepared to use such
weapons against civilian populations in Western Europe or the United
States. That this is a matter of official indifference only underscores
the glaring contradiction between the official expressions of concern
and the real motives underlying the US intervention.

The leaks about chemical weapons were made on the eve of a NATO
foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Tuesday and Wednesday. The
meeting will decide on Turkey’s request for the deployment of Patriot
surface-to-air missile batteries on the country’s 560-mile border with
Syria.

The Turkish government has claimed that the missiles are necessary to
counter an alleged threat of missiles with chemical warheads being
fired towards its territory by the Syrian armed forces.

Turkey has been among the most important state sponsors of the Syrian
insurgency, funneling arms and supplies and reportedly providing
Turkish military officers as “advisers.” It has allowed the anti-Assad
forces to use its territory as a base and hosted a CIA station, where US
operatives have coordinated the provision of arms, money and
intelligence to the “rebels.”

The deployment of the Patriot missiles, which both US and NATO
officials have indicated will be approved at this week’s meeting, will
mark a major turning point in the imperialist intervention in Syria. It
will place US and NATO forces in direct confrontation with the Syrian
military and pave the way for a far more open intervention.

While the missile batteries are supposedly aimed against a threat of
surface-to-surface missiles from Syria, a far more likely use is to deny
Syrian military aircraft the ability to operate in northern Syria,
effectively carving out a “no-fly zone” in which the US-NATO-backed
“rebels” can operate with relative impunity. As in last year’s US-NATO
intervention in Libya, such a development would likely prove the first
step in a direct war for regime-change.

The claims of threats from Syrian chemical weapons also serve as a pretext for a direct ground invasion. As the New York Times article
notes, the US and its allies “have long been developing contingency
plans in case they decided to intervene in an effort to neutralize the
chemical weapons, a task that the Pentagon estimates would require
upward of 75,000 troops.”

The article also points to the Pentagon’s having “quietly sent a task
force of more than 150 planners and other specialists to Jordan to help
the armed forces there to, among other things, prepare for the
possibility that Syria would lose control of its chemical weapons.” The
phrase “among other things” serves to mask the essential mission of this
force of US special operations troops, which is to aid the “rebel”
operations inside Syria and serve as an advance guard for a more direct
US-NATO intervention.

Debka.com, a web site with close ties to Israeli intelligence,
reported that last week the “rebels” had carried out an attack that
destroyed a Russian-built electronic warning radar station in southern
Syria, effectively blinding the regime in the face of any attacks
prepared by the Israeli military. According to a report in the Atlantic Monday, Israel
has approached the Jordanian government with plans for air strikes on
Syrian chemical weapons sites. Debka described the deployment of the
Patriot missiles and the attacks on Syrian radar as representing “a
coordinated military effort.”

Within just weeks of the US election, concerted preparations are
underway for yet another war of aggression in the Middle East. The
warnings about supposed threats from “weapons of mass destruction” are
an unmistakable echo of the lies used to justify the catastrophic US war
against Iraq a decade ago. The New York Times, the “newspaper
of record” and voice of official liberalism, served as the indispensable
conduit for government disinformation about non-existent Iraqi WMD,
lending credibility to the propaganda used to justify the unprovoked US
invasion. Clearly, the same modus operandi is being employed in Syria.

In the offing is a war with potentially far more devastating
consequences than the eight-year US intervention in Iraq or the more
than decade-long war in Afghanistan. In attacking Syria, US imperialism
is aiming to pave the way for an assault on Iran in a bid to reorganize
the entire region in its own interests.

Help Us Transmit This Story

Add to Your Blogger Account
Put it On Facebook
Tweet this post
Print it from your printer
Email and a collection of other outlets
Try even more services

Fatally Flawed: The Pursuit of Justice in a Suspicious Election

Voices of Opposition

Basic Statistics for U.S. Imperialism

New Additions

The World Reacts...

Click Picture

See Hillary Clinton Make Fun of Gaddafi's Murder

Here is Israel's Crap Treatment of an American Jew

People participate in movements when that particular movement

(1) meets their concrete and tangible needs,(2) offers individuals real experiences in the movement's outcome(3) provides a sense of community,(4) makes available ongoing education and skills training and(5) shows direct and effective ways for people to take further action.

A loose interpretation of a message sent on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 by the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy

Subscribe To

Free Trade's Race to the Bottom

A worker walks out of a factory building outfitted with nets, installed to prevent workers from jumping to their deaths, at a Foxconn factory, in Langfang, Hebei Province August 3, 2010. There have been nearly a dozen suicides at Foxconn plants around China this year alone, prompting calls for investigations into poor working conditions at the plants that make parts for customers such as Apple, HP and Dell. (REUTERS/Jason Lee) #

Portland 9/11 Truth Meetup Group and the Smell of Bacon

You can't have peacefor the sake of peace.Peace is a consequenceof an equitable arrangement.